Plugin, theme, CSS authors: Please don’t assume "Internet everywhere"!

Here’s a callout, inspired by a question on the Discord:

All plugin, theme and CSS authors: Please don’t assume “Internet everywhere”.

As much as we like having it and using plugins like Obsidian Leaflet, Dictionary and others, there are people working with their laptops, somewhere in the beautiful wilderness, without Internet access. Even I enjoy a quiet walk around the woods, sitting down at a nice place, and writing on my laptop. It can be really inspiring.

One of Obsidian’s strengths is that it can work without permanent online access, but plugin, theme and script authors tend to forget that.

So no Google fonts, no unnecessary internet accesses for things that can be done locally. If anyhow avoidable, that is. Please!

For instance, in the above case, using an online service to provide a progress bar could easily be solved by using the HTML <progress> element. Totally offline, and much faster and more reliable.

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Most definitely agree. Not least from a privacy and security perspective.

And people also regularly take flights where there is no Internet access. The point of Obsidian is to work predominantly offline.

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